MARCH MEETING, 1883.

The regular meeting was held in the Society's rooms, on Thursday afternoon, March 8, the President, the Hon. ROBERT C. WINTHROP, in the chair.

The record of the last meeting was read and approved.

The Librarian read a list of the donors to the Library during the last month. The Cabinet-keeper stated the gifts to the Cabinet.

The Corresponding Secretary reported that Captain G. V. Fox, of Washington, D. C., had accepted his election as a Corresponding Member.

The President, in announcing the deaths of two Resident Members of the Society, Dr. Chadbourne and Mr. Thayer, spoke as follows:

We can hardly claim, Gentlemen, any primary or principal part in the loss which has been sustained by our Commonwealth and country, since our last meeting, in the death of the Hon. Paul A. Chadbourne. Elected one of our Resident Members as recently as June, 1880, his name has been on our roll for less than three years; and I believe that we have only once enjoyed the satisfaction of welcoming him personally at our meetings.

But we are not the less sensible, on that account, how important a life has been prematurely closed, and how varied and valuable have been his services to his fellow-men. With no early advantages of family, fortune, or education, he had earned a reputation for ability, energy, and learning, which cannot soon be forgotten.

To have been selected as the successor of the accomplished and venerable Mark Hopkins, as President of Williams College, would alone have been a distinction of no common character. But his service in that sphere, for nearly ten years, was only one of his many kindred services in the cause of education, science, and religion. His name is associated also with Madison University in Wisconsin, with Bowdoin College in his native State of Maine, and with the Massachusetts Agricultural College at Amherst, of which he was the President at his death. The honorary degrees both of Doctor of Laws and of Doctor of Divinity had been conferred upon him by

these or other institutions, while a service of two or three years in our State Senate had entitled him to the secular prefix by which he is designated on our roll.

He died in New York, after a short illness, on the 23d of February last, in the fifty-ninth year of his age, leaving a deep sense of an unfinished career, from which much valuable fruit might still have been confidently expected.

But death has come nearer home to us, Gentlemen, in the departure of our Associate Member, Mr. Nathaniel Thayer, who died yesterday morning, at his residence in this city, in the seventy-fifth year of his age.

The son of one of the most distinguished Congregational clergymen of Massachusetts, and the younger brother and heir of one of the most eminent and successful bankers of our city, Mr. Thayer had long ago established his own individual title to be counted among the great financiers and benefactors of Boston.

For many years a member of the corporation of Harvard University, he was the founder of one of its most spacious and costly halls, which will bear down his name, with those of his father and brother, to a grateful posterity, and which is only one of his numerous benefactions to that institution.

A close and constant friend of the late beloved Louis Agassiz, he nobly volunteered to assume the whole expense of his most interesting and important scientific expedition to Brazil.

More recently, in connection with our late valued associate, Dr. Chandler Robbins, he was one of the foremost founders and supporters of that Children's Hospital which has at length obtained a permanent home, and of which he was the President when he died.

But these constitute but a small part of his contributions to the public welfare and to personal want; and I should be in danger of doing injustice to his memory by any attempt, on this occasion, to recall and enumerate the varied objects of his bounty. The details of such a career must be left for the formal memoir, for which it is our custom to provide.

Meantime his personal life and character have been known to us all, and we can all bear witness to the virtues and excellences which we have witnessed. Shut off for many months from the occupations of business and from the intercourse of friends by serious and exhausting illness, he bore his infirmi ties and sufferings with a brave and patient spirit, and awaited that change which he and all around him had long antici

pated, but which came at last so suddenly, with a Christian's hope and faith in a blessed hereafter.

I am instructed by the Council to submit the following Resolutions:

Resolved, That the Massachusetts Historical Society have heard with deep regret of the deaths of their distinguished and respected associates, Hon. Paul Ansel Chadbourne and Nathaniel Thayer, Esq., and that memoirs of them be prepared for some future volume of our Proceedings.

Resolved, That the memoir of Mr. Thayer be committed to Dr. George E. Ellis, and that of Dr. Chadbourne to Professor Egbert C. Smyth.

Dr. GEORGE E. ELLIS, in seconding the first Resolution, said:

It is with reason that this Society bears on its charter list, of one hundred members, the names of men known and honored among us for other services than those of chroniclers of past times or events, or of any form of authorship except that of good deeds. Such were among its founders nearly a century ago. Such have ever since been on its roll, as they are to-day. The Society lives by and lives for all the means and agents that foster intelligence, prosperity, patriotism, and all benevolent objects in this community. It gladly welcomes selected associates worthy and conspicuous in the manifold forms of high service for passing years or for all time to come, Those who write history, and those who do what will enter into history, need not weigh together their respective claims to membership. Among those who have sat in these halls, we recall the names of such as Perkins, Coolidge, Gardner, Welles, Tudor, Lawrence, Sears, Brooks, Mason, E. B. Bigelow, and others, whose works, other than those of research or chronicling of the past, none the less are historical, because of extended and permanent good.

Mr. Thayer had been a member of this Society for nineteen years. He certainly was not a familiar presence at our monthly meetings, but he kept himself well informed of our proceedings. In rare intervals of leisure from engrossing business cares of his own and of others, there were no volumes of which he so much enjoyed the perusal as those which go from these halls. Had he had time or taste for the use of his pen in narrative or history, he might have drawn from his own ledgers and letter-books a relation of the most authentic

and extraordinary character of his own agency in the marvellous development of intercommunication and traffic in the middle and western sections of this country. Hazardous and anxious contingencies came in with some of the complications and fluctuations of these enterprises, but large success for himself and for others crowned the results.

The best part of the record of every man's life is that of what he has done for others. Our community has been. trained to stand in inquisition by the side of Death, which is the great Probate Judge, as it takes the keys and searches the safe and the pockets of every deceased rich man, to find out what he has given away, and to whom. Mr. Thayer anticipated that inquisition. As soon as he realized the possession of very large means, he once said to me in words so strong and simple that they struck into my memory, "A power of money has come to me. If it is to make me happy, it will be by enabling me to do good with it." The good he did with it was most varied and comprehensive in object and method. It had the largeness of the ocean in its patronage of the interests of the highest sciences, and it ran into every stream and little rill which feeds great charities or helps and cheers private and unknown beneficiaries. A costly scientific expedition, a munificently planned herbarium, a noble college hall, a students' refectory, a town library building, a whole ward of free beds in more than one hospital, signalize a list of donations from which probably not a single one of all our ingeniously special benedictive and benevolent agencies is omitted. Many who during his long debility were uncertain whether he still survived, were assured of the fact by the recognition of his generous response to some of the most recent appeals. The papers of the day which announced his decease found his name and gift on the last of them. He would wish the privacies of his large kindness to remain so.

No tribute to Mr. Thayer, however brief or inadequate, may onit_connecting him with the beautiful Nashua valley town of Lancaster, and with the grateful and affectionate regard of all who dwell there. It was his birthplace, the scene of a happy boyhood, held by him to be his real home, for active work, rest, hospitality, and enjoyment for a great part of each year. Highways, farms, church, library, burialground, are all of them memorials of him. Filial veneration for his father, so long the pastor of the whole town, was the root of the bond which bound him there. The people in it who were old when he was young, and their children and children's children, growing on with his own years, seemed to

him alike his father's parishioners. The farmers would come to the walls and fences of the fields as he was driving by over the old roads, welcoming his cheerful and kindly interest in their work and crops. The Boston banker always appeared at his best as the Lancaster farmer.

The Rev. Dr. PEABODY then spoke as follows:

Mr. President, I cannot suffer the resolution before you to pass without paying my hearty, if inadequate, tribute to my dear friend, Mr. Thayer. I have never known a man who more truly lived to do good. He coined his own happiness from the happiness that he diffused. He seemed to assimilate into the substance of his own joy all the joy he gave. Simple in his tastes and habits, he sought and prized wealth, that as employer, host, citizen, private and public benefactor, he might make the most generous and liberal investments in whatever could contribute to comfort, enjoyment, and wellbeing, whether among those near him, or among those, however remote, whom his kindness could reach. I was his almoner in one of the many fields of his generous care. I furnished, at his no small cost, the dining hall, built almost wholly at his charge nearly twenty years ago, designed to board at the lowest possible rate such students of Harvard College as could afford to pay no more. For twenty-one years of active service in the college faculty, I gave in his behalf whatever I saw fit to needy students, the only conditions being that I should not use his name, and that I should never leave a deserving applicant unaided. The subsidies thus bestowed amounted to many more thousands of dollars than the years for which I was his agent in bestowing them. At the same time there were always in college, students-sons of clergymen with small salaries, of widows, of Lancaster men - whom he supported entirely and with the most liberal provision. In his native town it is impossible to say in what conceivable form his beneficence has not been felt alike in its public institutions and in every home where there has been want or distress. There are few persons in the town in need of counsel, sympathy, or aid, who have not ample reason to bless his memory, and there can hardly be a man, woman, or child within its borders who is not to-day à sincere mourner.

From what has incidentally come to my knowledge during my long intimacy with him, I am led to regard his public benefactions as but a small part of his charity. Far-off kindred, when in necessity or tribulation, have been counted by